


how to disappear completely

by Verbyna



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad Parenting, Chronic Illness, Elections, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Politics, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Roman Catholicism, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-08-12
Packaged: 2018-08-08 07:35:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7748920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armitage Hux and Ben Solo meet after they've both left the Marines. Politics and war aren't done with them yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how to disappear completely

**Author's Note:**

> This fic took a village! Thanks to everyone who read the first semi-coherent draft and offered advice, especially to **reserve** for the reassurance and her notes on academia. **psocoptera** asked all the right questions to whip both drafts into shape. All remaining mistakes are my own. 
> 
>  
> 
> **Join me on Tumblr - softersorrow - if you're so inclined.**

Hux has been saying goodbye to his mother for a very long time, and he’s yet to resign himself to it.

She can still look after herself. The doctors can’t say how long that will last, but for now, she’s more or less okay, except for the cough. It wakes him up sometimes--as large as the apartment is, the walls are thin, and he knows what she looks like when her body curves like punctuation, like an injured animal cradling the part that hurts the most.

They gave her two years to live when he was still in high school, but nine years later she’s still at Mass every Sunday. He goes with her. That was not his plan, this constant approximation of faith, but it makes her happy to be shoulder-to-shoulder with him in worship. She told him once that it’s the last part of home she carries with her; he didn’t tell her that she’s the last part, too, where he’s concerned.

It’s only exhausting if he lets himself think about it.

 

*

 

Ben moved in downstairs the summer after Hux finished his Master’s in military history. They missed each other at university by two years, but Hux didn’t find out about it until after they’d fallen into bed together the first couple of times.

Hux was a military brat. He only credits it with kindling his general interest in conflict and history. He has a mind for strategy, and he got through Recon training and a tour before he decided to stay home and look after his mother, but he occasionally admits to himself that he wasn’t built for the armed forces. He knows he is capable of terrible things, under the right circumstances. It’s not a very comfortable admission. In any case, he doesn’t regret getting out and focusing on his next degree.

He does wonder about Ben. He heard stories about Senator Organa’s son when he was still a Marine; to run into him as a civilian was jarring once Hux put two and two together. Spending time with him, later, made Ben’s foray into academia even more baffling than his reputation for brutality made the sudden exit. That it was theology, of all things, was frankly incensing.

They go to the same parish church. Hux can’t remember Ben ever confessing.

 

*

 

“My grandfather was a bishop,” Ben tells him, “and a reformer. He was excommunicated.”

Hux frowns at the giant crucifix behind Ben’s head, above the headboard; Ben is obnoxiously tall, even sitting down. He lets his eyes glide down to the stick-and-poke cross tattooed directly over Ben’s heart as he gathers his thoughts.

“My mother was a nurse,” he offers cautiously, “and my father was injured in combat. She wanted to be a nun.”

“But then you happened,” Ben fills in.

Hux digs his fingers into Ben’s _semper fi_ tattoo, up and to the left of the cross, and shakes his head. “I happened five years later. She fell in love, God knows how, and it ruined her.”

They kiss. Hux hurts all over; there was no protecting him from his father’s disappointment, but she tried. She stayed with Brendol until Hux was safely away learning how to kill people.

“Will you pray with me?” Ben asks, pushing Hux’s sweaty hair off his forehead. He’s looking at Hux like he’s putting violence aside to wait for an answer. 

“Quietly,” Hux says, because he’s not strong enough for _no._ It’s not a comfort for him, not like it is for Ben, but at least Ben’s trying.

They get through five rosaries - four sorrowful mysteries and one glorious mystery - before Hux admits that he’s not a believer.

“I know,” Ben says. “But it keeps you here.”

Hux doesn’t know what to do with that, so he fucks him into the mattress again.

 

*

 

His mother has a long list of things she wants Hux to do after she dies. He knows that the only part he can fulfill is going back to Ireland every couple of years, but he can’t deprive her of hope and repetition. She measures her life in rituals.

What he wants is tenure and solitude. They’re mutually exclusive, so he’ll settle for tenure, for finishing his PhD and writing his book. He’s hit a point in his dissertation where the mythical Organa archives would be very useful, and he knows that they’ll be essential for the book he’ll expand it into later. It’s hard to picture himself with Ben years into the future, but he doesn’t have much of a choice.

Sometimes he wonders what might’ve happened if Ben had done another tour and come back for one of Hux’s classes a couple of years later. Would Hux have compromised himself with a student? Would he have found the strength to follow his mother’s beliefs and not fuck men until she was gone?

He doubts it. Ben was only a choice for the time it took to think _yes, this._ Hux hates everything Ben stands for, but he can’t think of a single combination of external factors that would have prevented them from sleeping together. And Hux desperately needs to those files.

His mother says, “They do not know what they do.” She’s applied it to a lot of things, but now she’s just praying by rote, waiting out the cough with her rosary clutched tightly.

Hux rubs her back through the spasms and agrees to the words, if not the mythology. They have no idea.

 

*

 

When the call comes in, Hux is again naked and stranded in Ben’s apartment. His clothes are in the living room, and he’d have to walk through the webcam’s range to reach them. Of all the things he hates about Ben, his disregard for propriety consistently ranks at the top of the list. The previous week he tried to fellate Hux while Hux was speaking on the phone to one of his students.

“Just ten minutes,” the intern on the screen says. Hux identified her as Senator Organa’s niece, because he’s stayed abreast of the elections. He’s not an imbecile. “Come on, just ten minutes, we can do a remote cast, talk about your service and the importance of military families and then it’s over.”

“No,” says Ben. From the bed, Hux can see his shoulders tightening. “Did she tell you that I was almost court martialed? Did Han put you up to this?”

Hux closes his eyes and pictures the desert to remove himself from the situation. It’s not dead, like people think. It’s not always hot, either. Between shitting in public and almost throwing up at his own body odor, Hux learned a lot about wildlife. He learned how to see himself as part of a food chain. He learned about putrefaction and constellations and pure, animal instinct.

It’s those instincts that urge him to cover himself with the sheet before Ben turns the camera around.

“Well, shit,” Rey Skywalker says. “I had no--who’s that?”

Ben laughs, mocking. “That’s my no.”

“Who are you?” Rey Skywalker asks Hux, when it becomes clear that Ben will be unreasonable.

“No,” Ben repeats, “I’m not doing the interview,” but by then Hux is already saying, “Armitage Hux.”

“Like the senator?” the girl asks, paling.

Ben turns back around to the screen, shouting, but Hux just nods. He has the strange feeling that he will remember this moment for the rest of his life: the moment where he not only slept with the son of his father’s opposition, but admitted to it in public.

 

*

 

“You were supposed to be a way out of this circus,” Ben whispers a few months later.

They’re at a rally in Ohio. Hux left Phasma in charge of his classes and his mother, but he’s not all here, either. There’s a ticking clock in the back of his mind--this far till he gets his degree, until he has to start work on the book, this far to the inevitable funeral. His life is happening elsewhere, and Ben’s regrets seem very childish with that distance.

“I don’t give any more of a fuck about this campaign than you do,” Hux says. “But like my mother says, one takes up one’s cross and follows.” Ben’s lips tighten, bloodless.

Hux is aware of all the bridges burned between Ben and his family, of the weight of Hux’s own presence when his father is the opposition candidate, even if Hux stays backstage, but he can’t find it in himself to care if he’s being used. He’s here for a reason.

“Stop paraphrasing the Word,” Ben hisses.

Hux smiles, then cups Ben’s crotch and relishes his flinch. “Go be a good boy for mommy.”

Through Rey, Leia promised him a whole day in the archives if he showed up for the rally and kept Ben in line. He’ll make it up to Ben later.

 

*

 

“The holy women found the tomb open,” Hux’s mother recites, “and they were frightened.”

Hux takes in her red hair and her pale, stiff shoulders. So strong, even in the face of death. He thinks of the burial he’s already paid for per her wishes, just dirt and a quick undoing back into the world. He wonders if his mourning for her will be as straightforward as that.

“Armitage?” she prompts.

“Mary Magdalene was the only true apprentice,” he says. “Death is not simple.”

“Peter--”

“He waited for confirmation of the miracle,” Hux cuts in. “He didn’t truly believe.”

She turns her face away. At one point or another, she always does, when they talk about these things.

She’s still beautiful. Hux has her features, but only in the most general sense; he doesn’t have her symmetry, her grace, her disarming fragility. He certainly doesn’t have her strength. In that, he almost can relate to Ben. Their mothers are hard acts to follow.

“Pray with me,” she asks, giving up on the debate. He takes the wooden rosary she holds out. His fingers move the beads around until he’s ready to start. “The Resurrection.”

She begins to cough before Jesus breathes forgiveness upon the apostles. Hux rubs her back with one hand, moves the rosary with the other. He thinks about Ben in the desert, and wonders how that violence felt for Ben after a lifetime of hiding in churches. Did it feel like freedom?

Did he truly believe his family would leave him alone if he made himself into a monster?

 

*

 

“No.”

“He just wants to--” Rey furiously explains.

Hux allows himself the luxury of his father’s public mask. Brendol may be losing in the polls, but he can strip the legitimacy off a request with the tilt of his eyebrow, and as much as Hux normally hates it, he takes after both of his parents. He stares her down.

“I will not associate with criminals. I am months away from getting my degree, and I can’t alienate the department’s donors. My mother is fragile, and frankly, I would only insult Han Solo if I met him in person. This speech is not happening.”

Rey could carry the republic if given the chance. Hux find himself squinting against her glare.

“Word will get out,” she says through gritted teeth. “You can’t keep toeing the line. You can’t have Ben and your father, too.”

Hux doesn’t mean to laugh, but once he starts, he can’t stop.

A week later, the first article about Brendol’s son supporting Leia Organa hits the press. His father doesn’t acknowledge the news, but some of Hux’s students make a point to sneer at him.

They would probably walk out of the lecture hall entirely if Hux admitted that he’s never voted in his life. It’s one thing to be underhanded when it comes to getting access to documents; academia is not all that dignified when it comes down to it. It’s another thing entirely to be a veteran but have no opinion when it comes to their subject, to their country, to being seen at a pacifist’s campaign office after he lectures them on war.

Han Solo goes up on stage alone, though, and Hux and Ben’s personal relationship doesn’t become public. He’ll take whatever victories he can.

 

*

 

He doesn’t mean to call Ben when his mother is in the hospital. In fact, he promises himself he won’t, but after Ben shows up uninvited, Hux realizes he didn’t want to be alone for this.

He doesn’t like being seen when he’s vulnerable, but he stops pushing Ben away. He allows himself this one weakness.

It takes a week for her to go. Ben doesn’t leave his side. He pulls Hux away from his mother’s bedside to sleep, to eat, to shower, to sit in the chapel and suppress his fear and frustration. Ben prays for her and stays out of the room when she’s awake.

Hux considers coming out to her, but he doesn’t want her to die worrying for his soul.

She dies quietly, not knowing that he was involved with a man. Ben’s giant paws curl around Hux’s hips as he signs the papers. And then she’s gone, all that belief erased in a blink, and all that’s left is his hope that the tree he’ll plant over her corpse will take.

“She will rise again,” Ben whispers after the funeral, as if that’s some sort of comfort.

They’re alone. Brendol didn’t even send a campaign intern. Hux stares at the green carpet around her hole in the ground, at his own dirt-stained hand in front of it.

“I should fucking hope not,” he growls. “She earned her rest.”

 

*

 

He subrents his apartment to Phasma when he moves in with Ben. She’s not around often, between classes and her internship, but it goes against Hux’s nature to waste real estate.

Organa tries to contact him several times to get to Ben. She even sends her despicable ex to do it once, but Hux doesn’t open their door to let Solo in. He doesn’t mention the incident to Ben, either.

He edits the syllabus for all three of his classes, Ben hovering in the background, and only picks up the phone if it’s Phasma asking about the plumbing downstairs or obscure citations.

“You miss her, I know,” Ben says, but that doesn’t crack Hux as open as Ben thinks. “Don’t think about her. Just be here.”

_Just be here,_ Hux repeats in the early hours, with Ben’s arm trapping his chest. Where is here? Where is he?

Ben says, “I need to tell you something.”

 

*

 

“Anywhere but there,” he whispers furiously to Ben after they exit Director Snoke’s office. “Literally anywhere but there, I don’t care if he mentored you, I’d rather have your mother or my fucking father in charge of my life, I--”

Ben looks around before he pushes Hux into a closet. That’s more thought than he’d normally put into it, but they’re usually home for this, so Hux doesn’t question it. He welcomes Ben’s tongue and hands and cut-up face, and he tries to stop thinking.

When someone knocks loudly on the door, he pretends they hadn’t been breathing against each other for several indefensible minutes. He pretends he’s not scared.

Snoke’s recruitment speech for Hux didn’t try to make it sound like Hux would be Jason Bourne, or any sort of hero. He didn’t even mention Hux’s father. He just told Hux he would be useful, that there are places where a man as ruthless as Hux would be valuable indeed. He called it a vocation for destruction, which is when Hux grabbed Ben and fled.

It was terrifying to be seen for what he is, aimless and rootless and still desperate to prove himself. 

Still, it makes a terrible sort of sense that Ben is only pretending to be a civilian. Hux recalls a dozen details that he’d brushed off before: extra trips to the gun range, the way Ben was only on camera with his scar hidden, the way he’s heard Phasma describe Ben as _mild-mannered_ once when Hux knows exactly what sort of beast he is.

 

*

 

“I need to go back,” Ben says. “That’s why I told you. That’s what I was made for, and so were you.”

Hux settles deeper into Ben’s expensive couch. He looks carefully at Ben’s face, at the clenched jaw and narrowed eyes and the edge of his scar just barely visible from this angle. He’s still trying to decide whether he was being recruited from the start, and how he should feel about it.

“I need to go back to my classes,” he says, even though he publishes more than enough to warrant an extended stay at home. He hasn’t even gone through half the files in the Organa archive. Does he still want the life he chose when he began to be afraid of himself? Which is the way forward and which is the way back?

“I just--” Ben says, before he reaches a hand to grasp Hux’s leg and his face crumbles. Hux pulls him in by his hair and hides the wreckage.

“I know you can’t get that anywhere else,” Hux says, barely audible against Ben’s wild hair. “That sense of purpose. I know what it’s like to be good at something awful.”

Ben pulls away from Hux. His expression is only bearable if Hux unfocuses his eyes and looks through him into the middle distance.

“I’ll have to confess you first,” Ben whispers. “Even if you join.”

Confess and repent, he means. Swear to God not to touch a man again, because if he goes back to war he might die, and with Hux as a secret he thinks he’ll go to Hell.

Hux blinks and takes in the rest of Ben’s body: the defined muscles, the hint of a hipbone, the tense thighs. The ink spilled over most of it, faith granted and broken since he was eighteen, until only the body is left. Until he turned himself into a weapon.

They are almost thirty years old. It’s too late to change who they are.

“Confess me, then.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben says. 

He’s not really asking for forgiveness. He’s not asking for anything impossible, but Hux is willing to give him permission to leave him, if that’s what Ben needs.

 

*

 

Hux adds Leia’s exploits to his syllabus and goes on with his life.

Organa may be POTUS now, but there are limits to her power, and one of them is sanction to speak of her son and his missions; Ben is removed from the family archive. 

The program is still classified, but Hux can see Ben’s eyes and hands in it whenever parts of it make the news. The complete disregard for orders, unless they’re tailored for his skill set. Ben is Recon to the bone, a fucking brat to the bone; Hux would recognize him anywhere. 

He misses him more than he thought he would.

He visits his mother’s grave every Sunday. He teaches Monday through Friday and counsels his students on Saturdays. He writes like he’s possessed the rest of the time. 

“You’ll burn out,” Phasma warns him.

“Not before I finish the book,” he tells her, and waits for Ben to come home. He doesn’t know what they can be to each other now, what Ben is allowed to tell him, but he wants to know if Ben found his peace.

He wants to know if it was worth it.

 

*

 

“You have to choose,” Ben says. He looks like shit, leaner and bruised, too wild around the edges. He looks very, very alive. It’s been a long year without him.

Hux thinks about every time his father treated his mother like a servant, even with Hux at the table. He thinks about the way every cent he ever made was predicated upon approval. He thinks about rosaries, about the distant possibility of tenure, about his book being released later in the year and the way he can’t see past that anymore.

“You know what I’ll choose,” Hux says. “If I do this, you’re mine.”

He does not expect his tactics to be acknowledged on record in his lifetime, but the war is brutal and Hux will use Ben to make it shorter. He would only have to answer to Snoke; not even Organa and her staff would know the extent of his involvement. 

“You can make a difference, I swear,” Ben says very earnestly. “Don’t hide in that office. I need you here.”

He will eventually have to send Ben to his death. He has no illusions about that. It’s a matter of when, not if: Ben is good, and that means the impossible will be asked of him sooner or later. Hux will never be allowed to speak of it. But if he stays out of it, Ben will die without him, and Hux won’t even know about it. Somewhere along the way, Hux picked a side. Isn’t that what his mother always said, that everyone must bloom where they’re planted? Isn’t some borrowed time with Ben worth it, in the end?

“I’ll do it,” he says, and everything settles into place. “I’ll report to Snoke tomorrow for instructions.”

He think of stars over the desert, blinking out. He thinks of his mother and her miracles. Then he thinks of the war, and begins to plan.


End file.
